JAN
APPEL: A REVOLUTIONARY HAS DIED

On
the Fourth of May (1985), the last great figure of the Communist International, Jan
Appel, died at the age of 95. The proletariat will never forget this life, a
life of struggle for the liberation of humanity.

The
revolutionary wave of the beginning of this century ran aground. Thousands of revolutionary
marxists were killed in Russia and
Germany,
some even committing suicide. But, despite this long night of the counter­-revolution,
Jan Appel remained true to marxism. He remained faithful to the working class,
con­vinced that the proletarian revolution would come.

Jan Appel was formed and tempered in the
revo­lutionary movement in Germany and
Holland at
the beginning of this century. He fought side by side with Rosa Luxemburg, Karl
Liebknecht, Lenin, Trotsky, Gorter, Pannekoek. He fought in the German
revolution in 1918—19. He was one of those who never betrayed the cause of the
proletariat. He was a worthy representa­tive of this anonymous mass of the dead
generations of the proletariat. Their historic struggle always renounced the glorification
of personalities or the search for exalted titles. Just like Marx and Engels,
Jan Appel never had anything to do with the sensationalist capitalist press.

But he was also more than this anonymous mass of
courageous revolutionary militants produced by the revolutionary wave of the
workers’ move­ment at the beginning of our century. He left behind him traces
which permit revolutionaries today to take up the torch. Jan Appel was able to recognise
those who, just as anonymously, and reduced for the moment to a small minority,
continued the communist combat. It was thus with pride that we welcomed Jan Appel
to the founding Congress of the International Commu­nist Current in 1976 in Paris

(An index of the initials used here is supplied at the
end of this article.)

Born in 1890 in Mecklenburg in Germany,
Jan Appel began at a very early age to work in the shipyards in Hamburg.
From 1908 on he was an active member of the SPD. During the tormen­ted war
years, he took part in discussions on the new questions posed to the working
class: its attitude in face of the imperialist war and of the Russian
Revolution. This was what led him, at the end of 1917, beginning of 1918, to
join up with the left radicals in Hamburg who
had taken a clear position against the war, for the revolution. Thus he
followed the July 1917 appeal of the Hamburg IKD calling on all revolutionary
workers to work towards the con­stitution of an ‘International Social Demo­cratic
Party’ in opposition to the reformist-opportunist politics of the majority of
the SPD. Pushed on by the workers’ struggles at the end of 1918, he also joined
the Spartakus­bund of Rosa Luxemburg and took up, after the formation of the
KPD(S), a position of responsibility in the district group in Hamburg.

1918 was above all the year of the great strikes in Hamburg and
in the whole of Ger­many
after November, in which Appel was to he found in the front line. The workers
of the shipyards had in fact long been vanguard fighters who from the beginning
adopted a revolutionary attitude, and, pushed by the IKD and the KPD(S), took
the lead in the struggle against the orientations of the reac­tionary SPD, the
centrist USPD and the refor­mist unions. It was in their midst that the
revolutionary factory delegates, and after­wards the AAU, saw the light of day.
To quote Appel himself:

“In January 1918, the armaments and ship­yard
workers (under military control), came to revolt everywhere against the strait­jacket
of the war, against hunger, lack of clothing, against misery. And this through
the general strike. At first, the working class, the proletarians in uniform,
didn’t understand these workers ... but news of the situation, of this combat
of the working class, penetrated the most remote corners. And since the balance
of forces was suffi­ciently ripe, since nothing could be saved from the
military economy and the so—called German Empire, thus, the working class and the
soldiers applied what they had learnt from the pioneers of January 1918” (Hempel,
pseudo­nym of Jan Appel, at the Third Congress of the Communist International,
July 1921).

And on the November strikes in Hamburg, Appel
recalled:

“When, in November 1918 the sailors
revolted and the workers of the shipyards in Kiel
downed tools, we learned at the Vulkan military ship­yard from the workers what
had happened. There followed a secret meeting at the shipyards; the factory was
under military occupation, work ceased, but the workers remained in assembly in
the enterprise. A delegation of 17 volunteers was sent to the union
headquarters, to insist on the declaration of a general strike. We insisted on
holding an assembly, but it turned out that the known leaders of the SPD and of
the unions took up an attitude opposed to the movement. There were hours of
harsh discuss­ions. During this time, at the Blohm und Voss shipyard, where
17,000 workers were employed, a spontaneous revolt broke out. And so, all the
workers poured out of the factories, at the Vulkan shipyard too (where Appel
worked) and set off towards the union house. It was at this moment that the
leaders disappeared. The revolution had begun.” (Appel, 1966, in a discussion
with H M Bock).

It was above all the revolutionary factory
delegates elected at that moment who organised the workers in factory councils,
independent of the unions. Jan Appel was elected, on acc­ount of his active and
preponderant part in the events, as the president of the revolutionary
delegates. It was he who, along with Ernst Thalmann, revolutionary shop steward
of the USPD, was designated by a mass assembly after the assassination of Rosa
Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht to organise the following night a march on the
Barenfeld Barracks, in order to arm the workers. The lack of centralisation of the
councils, especially with Berlin, the dis­persion and above all the weakness of
the KPD(S) which was just forming itself, did not allow the movement to
develop, and two weeks later the movement broke down. This led to the period
when attention was mainly oriented towards the reinforcement of the organisation.

For the workers in struggle, the unions
were dead organs. At the beginning of 1919, the local unions in Hamburg,
among other places, were dissolved, the dues and funds were divided amongst the
unemployed. In August, the Confer­ence of the northern district of the KPD(S),
with Hamburg at
the head, obliged its members to leave the unions. According to Appel:

“At that moment, we reached the
conclusion that the unions were unusable for the revolutionary struggle, and
that led, at an assembly of the revolutionary delegates to propaganda for the
constitution of revolutionary factory organisations, as the basis for the
councils. Departing from Hamburg, this
propaganda for the formation of enterprise organisations spread, leading to the
Allgemeine Arbeiter Unionen (AAU)” (ibid.).

On the 15 August, the revolutionary
delegates met in Essen,
with the approval of the Central Committee of the KPD(S) to found the AAU. In
the paper of the KAZ different articles appeared at this time explaining
the basis for the deci­sion and why the unions no longer had a raison d’etre
for the working class in decadence, and therefore the revolutionary period, of
the capitalist system.

Jan Appel, as the president of the
revolutionary delegates, and an active organiser, was thus also elected
president of the KPD(S) of Hamburg.
During the subsequent months, the tensions and conflicts between the central
committee of Paul Levi, and the northern section of the KPD(S) in particular,
multiplied, above all around the question of the unions, the AAU and the mass
party. At the Second Congress of the KPD in October 1919 in Heidelberg,
where the ques­tions of the utilisation of parliamentarism and the unions were
discussed and voted, Appel, as the president and delegate of the Hamburg
district, took up a clear position against the opportunist theses which were
opposed to the most revolutionary developments. The opposi­tion, although in a
majority, was excluded from the party: at the Congress itself, 25 particip­ants
were excluded straight away. The Hamburg
group in its quasi-totality declared itself in agreement with the opposition,
being followed by other sections. After making different attempts at opposition
within the KPD(S), in February 1920 all the sections in agreement with the
opposition were finally excluded. But it wasn’t until March that all efforts to
re­dress the KPD(S) from within broke down. March 1920 was in fact the period
of the Kapp Putsch, during which the central committee of the KPD(S) launched
an appeal for a general strike, while propagating a line of ‘loyal opposition’
to the social democratic govern­ment and negotiating to avoid any armed revolu­tionary
revolt. In the eyes of the opposition, this attitude was a clear and cutting
sign of the abandonment of any revolutionary politics.

When in April 1920 the Berlin
group left the KPD, the basis was given for the construction of the KAPD; 40,000
members, among them Jan Appel, had left the KPD.

In the insurrectional combats of the Ruhr
in March 1920, Jan Appel was once more to be found in the foremost ranks, in
the unionen, in the assemblies, in the struggles. On the basis of his active
participation in the struggles since 1918 and of his organisational talents,
the participants at the Founding Con­gress of the KAPD appointed Appel and
Franz Jung to represent them at the Communist Inter­national in Moscow.
They came to negotiate adhesion to the Third International and to discuss the
treacherous attitude of the Central Committee of the KPD during the
insurrection in the Ruhr. In
order to get to Moscow,
they had to divert the course of a ship. On arrival they held discussions with
Zinoviev, presi­dent of the Communist International, and with Lenin. On the
basis of Lenin’s text Left-Wing Communism — an Infantile Disorder, they
dis­cussed at great length, refuting among other things the false accusation of
syndicalism (in other words the rejection of the role of the party) and of
nationalism. Thus Appel, in his article ‘Information on Moscow’
and ‘Where is Ruhle heading?’ in the KAZ, defended the position that Laufenberg
and Wolfheim ought to be excluded “since we can have more confidence in the
Russian communists than in the German nationalists who have left the terrain of
the class struggle”. Appel declared also that he had “judged that Ruhle
also no longer found himself on the terrain of the programme of the party; if
this vision had proven itself to be wrong, the exclusion of Ruhle would not
have been posed. But the delegates had the right and the duty in Moscow to
defend the programme of the party.”

He made many more trips to Moscow to
get the KAPD admitted as a sympathising organisation to the IIIrd
International, and thereby partici­pated at the Third Congress in 1921.

In the meantime, Appel had travelled
around Germany
under the false name of Jan Arndt, and was active wherever the KAPD and the AAUD
sent him. Thus, he became responsible for the weekly Der Klassenkampf of
the AAU in the Ruhr,
where he remained until November 1923.

At the Third Congress of the Communist
Inter­national, in 1921, Appel again, along with Meyer, Schwab and Reichenbach,
were the dele­gates to conduct the final negotiations in the name of the KAPD,
against the growing opportun­ism of the CI. They attempted in vain to form a
left opposition with the delegations of Bul­garia, Hungary, Luxemburg, Mexico, Spain, Brit­ain, Belgium and
the USA.
Firstly, ignoring the sarcasms of the Bolshevik delegation or the KPD, Jan
Appel, under the pseudonym of Hempel, underlined at the end of the Third
Congress some fundamental questions for the world revolu­tion today. Let us
recall his words:

“The Russian comrades lack an
understanding of what is happening in Western
Europe. The Russian comrades have experienced
a long Czar­ist domination, they are hard and solid, where­as where we come
from the proletariat is pene­trated by parliamentarism and is completely in­fested
by it. In Europe we
have to proceed dif­ferently. The path to opportunism has to be barred ... Opportunism
among us is the utilisa­tion of bourgeois institutions in the economic domain ...
The Russian comrades are not super­men either, and they need a counterweight,
and this counterweight must be a IIIrd International ridding itself of any
tactic of compromise, parliamentarism and the old unions.”

Appel was arrested in November 1923 on the
charge of inciting mutiny on the ship with which the delegation had arrived in Moscow in
1920. In prison he prepared a study of the wor­kers’ movement and in particular
of the period of transition towards communism, in the light of the lessons of
events in Russia.

He was set free at the end of 1925, but Germany had
become dangerous for him, and he obtained work at a shipyard in Holland. He
immediately took contact with Canne-Meyer, whom he had not known personally, in
order to be able to inte­grate himself into the situation in Holland.
Departing from this contact, ex—members of the KPN and/or the KAPN regrouped
slowly, and in 1927 formed the GIC which published a review, Press Material
of the International Commu­nists (PIC), as well as an edition in German. It
closely followed the evolution of the KAPD in Germany and
oriented itself more towards the Theses of the Berlin KAPD, in opposition to
the group around Gorter. Over four years, the GIC studied and discussed the
study which Appel had made in prison, and the book Foundations of Communist
Production and Distribution was published in 1930 by the Berlin AAU, a book
which has been discussed and criticised by revolutionaries throughout the world
to this very day.

Appel made many other important
contributions during the difficult years of the counter-revo­lution, up until
World War II, against the posi­tions of the degenerating Communist Parties,
rapidly becoming bourgeois. The GIC worked in contact with other small
revolutionary organisations in different countries (like the Ligue des
Communistes Inter­nationalistes in Belgium, the group around Bilan,
Union Communiste in France, the group around Paul Mattick in the USA etc.), and
was one of the most important currents of this period in keep­ing
internationalism alive. From 1933 on Appel kept in the background, since the Dutch
state, on good terms with Hitlerite Germany, would have expelled him. Until
1948, Appel remained in clandestinity under the name of Jan Vos.

During and after the second world war
however, Appel and other members of the GIC regrouped with the Spartacusbond
coming out of the ‘Marx— Lenin—Luxemburg Front’, the only internationa­list organisation
in Holland
until 1942. The members of the GIC, who were expecting, like all the other revolutionary
organisations at that time, important class movements after the war, considered
it important to regroup, even if there still existed divergences between them,
in order to prepare a more important, stronger revolutionary organisation, with
the aim of playing a more preponderant role in the move­ments. But these
movements did not develop, and numerous discussions cropped up in the group on
the role and the tasks of the political organisa­tion. Appel remained within
the Spartacusbond and defended positions against the councilist ideas which
were being reinforced within the group. Almost all the GIC members left the
group in 1947, only to quickly disappear into the void. Witness a letter by
Pannekoek, him­self having become a councilist, in September 1947:

“And now that the strong mass movement
hasn’t turned up, nor the influx of young workers (we had counted on this for
the period after the war, and it was certainly the fundamental motive of the
GIC in regrouping with Spartacusbond in the last year of the war), it follows
logically that the GIC returned to its old role, not preven­ting the
Spartacusbond from returning to its old role as RSP. According to my
information, the question of which form of propaganda to choose is presently
being discussed in the GIC ... it’s a pity that Jan Appel has stayed with the
people of Spartacusbond. Already in the past, I have noted how his spirit and
his conceptions are determined by his experiences in the great German movement
which was the culminating point of his life. It’s there that he formed his
understand­ing of the organisational techniques of the coun­cils. But he was
too much a man of action to be content with simple propaganda. But the wish to
be a man of action in a period in which the mass movement doesn’t yet exist,
easily leads to the formulation of impure and mystified forms of action.
Perhaps it’s a good thing after all that Spartacus has held on to one strong
element.”

By accident, Appel was re-discovered by
the Dutch police in 1948. After encountering many difficulties, he was allowed
to stay in Holland,
but was forbidden any political activity. Appel thus formally left
Spartacusbond and organised political life.

After 1948, however, Appel remained in contact
with his old comrades, both in Holland and
else­where, among others with Internationalisme, pre­decessor of the
ICC, at the end of the forties and during the fifties. That’s why Jan Appel was
once again present at the end of the sixties at the founding of Revolution
Internationale, the future section in France of
the ICC, and a product of the massive struggles of the proleta­riat in 1968.
Since then with numerous visits from comrades and sympathisers of the ICC, Jan
Appel contributed to the formation of a new generation of revolutionaries, participating
at the formal constitution of the ICC in 1976, one last time, thereby passing
on the torch and the lessons of one generation of revolutionaries to another.

Until the very end, Jan Appel was convinced
that “only the class struggle is important”. We con­tinue his struggle.